Goosebumps Turning The Page To Childhood
When characters leap out of the book and onto the big screen.
Some of my earliest memories involve being sprawled on the floor of a local bookstore, surrounded by books, flipping through blurbs and admiring the vividly painted covers, trying to recollect which books I already have, and neatly arranging a pile to take back home. The Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine stood proudly on my tiny bookstand as a young reader building her collection, and many books still grace my shelves several decades later.
When the movie Goosebumps released in 2015, I was curious about how the best-selling children’s book franchise of the same name would be re-created by filmmakers. Goosebumps is not an adaptation of any specific Stine book, but a standalone movie based on all his books. A teenager teams up with the daughter of a writer, to defeat imaginary demons that have come to life. A very interesting premise with Jack Black playing R.L. Stine, the horror book writer whose literary characters escape the prisons of their pages and create havoc.
I love Jack Black — his humor in School of Rock and the new Jumanji movies oscillates between endearing and laugh-out-loud — and I was looking forward to his interpretation of the author himself in a role that was rumored to have been offered to Jim Carrey, both actors being Stine’s favorites, as revealed in his autobiography ‘It Came From Ohio.’
The movie begins with a youngster moving into a new house, with a reclusive neighbour who spans the spectrum of rude, secretive, and creepy. The neighbour’s daughter is homeschooled and is restricted from going anywhere, meeting anyone, or even speaking to anybody. Just like the protagonist, the viewer is introduced to Stine as a secondary character (downplayed by Black, but so brilliantly portrayed in his introductory scene). In an attempt to find out more about the suspicious character, our young hero snoops around the former’s house, only to come across locked up manuscripts, which he promptly unlocks, causing the abominable snowman (The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, 1995) to literally leap off the pages. Slappy (The Night of the Living Dummy, 1993) makes a similar escape soon enough through an opened book, and in turn unlocks all the other books, leading a plethora of Stine’s horrendous creations to trample and terrorize the town.
Directed by Rob Letterman, Goosebumps is a simple story in itself. The books were created as a series of horror tales for young readers, and I love how the movie caters to both younger crowds as well as older adults who can fondly revisit old memories of reading the books. Darren Lemke’s screenplay parodies what’s going on in the viewer’s mind. When a character remembers Stine as a “children’s book writer”, another admonishes him that Stine is a horror writer, one who can be read and enjoyed by all. R.L. Stine served as an introduction to horror writing in my own experiences as a reader, before Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Shirley Jackson arrived on the scene. While literary minds around me were occupied with Sweet Valley Twins (1986), Stine kept me engaged with Goosebumps (followed by his Fear Street series as I grew older).
The hints towards “Steve” can’t be missed. Ask anyone about horror literature, and Stephen King will be mentioned. Whether people read him or not, one is expected to know about him in connection with the genre. I like how the movie plays on this author competitiveness and reader choices. There’s an ongoing joke in the movie of Stine having sold more books worldwide than King, which is, in fact, quite true. Neighbourhood ghosts, strange cuckoo clocks, and killer plants welcomed me into their world much before murderous cars, haunted hotels, and zombie cats did.
In another King reference, Stine searches for a quiet place to write his new novel, only to land up in an auditorium where a stage production of “The Shining” has been set, alluding to the dangers that beset a writer (both Jack Torrance in The Shining, and R.L. Stine in Goosebumps). Before we get formally introduced to Stine, his character is referred to as Mr. Shivers — a reference to the Shivers novels, a series of horror books for children that came out in the late nineties, often considered a rip-off of Stine’s Goosebumps series.
In a hilarious scene, while escaping from a giant mantis, Stine wonders what monster it is and for which book he created it, until the mantis attacks. The movie wonderfully captivates readers by inciting us to identify the monsters and the books that featured them, recall when we read them, and hark back to what the stories were about. And then it clicks, and all those years passed by come rushing back — of a story read on a trip, during the summer holidays, while taking a break from studying, picking the book from a stack in the store, arranging it neatly in the bookshelves. A marvelous blend of cinema with literature!
R.L. Stine had commended the filmmakers for permitting him to read the script, and acknowledging his feedback and suggestions. In spite of being a long-standing and much-loved book series, the Goosebumps books hadn’t been adapted for the big screen before because Stine has written so many of them, which he admits was a major hurdle in getting a movie adaptation made. This was precisely what made him love the original story even more — it’s a home for all his favorite characters. The author also plays a cameo as a drama teacher named Mr. Black — a whimsical play on actors and names, with Jack Black playing Mr. Stine.
In the movie, Stine’s characters come to life because he uses a special typewriter that binds the writer’s soul with his words, and the only way to stop the monsters is to create a new story with them all back on the page. This plotline follows Stine’s “The Blob That Ate Everyone,” (1997) where the protagonist has a typewriter that brings his horror stories to life. Slappy, the ventriloquist’s dummy, and the invisible boy (Revenge of the Invisible Boy, 2019) are both voiced by Jack Black — a superb ode to a writer’s imagination; how his characters are from him and of him, and his mind gives them life.
Hannah Fairchild, the lawn gnomes, the graveyard ghouls, Pumpkinhead, the body squeezers, Fifi the vampire poodle, mutant plants, and a host of memorable monsters take us back to The Cuckoo Clock of Doom, The Ghost Next Door, A Shocker on Shock Street, Night of the Living Dummy, The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, A Nightmare on Clown Street, Be Careful What You Wish For — a trip through books of the past; palms perusing bookshelves. The long-standing series is alluded to in a multitude of ways, from the manuscripts on Stine’s shelves to the monsters set free, the characters in the movie, and the end credits featuring book covers; not to forget the twists, just like Stine’s stories. Or as Black states in the movie, “There are three main parts to any story — the beginning, the middle, and the twist!”
Jack Black is an absolute delight as R.L. Stine, a solitary character who began writing to make up for a lack of friends, replacing real people with story characters who filled not just his mind but also the loneliness in his life. When the youngsters try to destroy the monsters, Slappy proclaims they can’t be killed because they’re from Stine’s mind, and they will always be his creations. Goosebumps is not meant to be a scary movie; it’s a reminder of the scary stories we read as kids, and that’s just how Black portrays it.
A wonderful movie right till the end, which brings together the Goosebumps original series, Give Yourself Goosebumps, the 2000 series, Goosebumps Horrorland, and Goosebumps Most Wanted. Ironically, Stine had resisted his publisher’s idea of writing horror stories for children, since he already had his Fear Street series for young adults. Not wanting to lose his teenage crowd by turning to children’s books, he agreed to write two or three stories to pacify the publisher.
Since 1992, Goosebumps has sold over 400 million copies worldwide (ahead of Stephen King’s 350 million copies), been translated into 35 languages, spawned a TV series, videogames, comic books, merchandise, and also the Goosebumps movie and its sequel. The original series sold 4 million books a month and was the biggest book series in France and China in the first two years of its release. The cover art by Tim Jacobus was as loved as Stine’s writing was — humor and horror making each one indelibly imprinted in memory.
As Stine has said, “Goosebumps isn’t really about scaring kids; it’s about getting them to read,” and for someone whose early reading years were occupied by this magnificent series of books, this movie particularly strikes a chord.
